‘Separate but equal’: Are we right to separate jazz and classical?
Wilf Amis · 25 June 2017 · 05:00PM
That old question... Is jazz a form of classical music?
Note: This was originally a 4000 word essay for my course; if you have too much time on your hands you can read the whole thing at this link.
Don’t be pedantic, the word “classical” has already been severed from meaning the Classical period of Haydn and Mozart, so that “classical” merely means Western art music. Again, I know – and you know – that all music is art, but it’s a term for the more stuck up academics and critics basically meaning the opposite of Bieber. Actually, we can drop “western” because Ravi Shankar and the like are referred to as Hindustani classical music, so this is not a strictly western thing. I shall discuss four different views on comparing jazz to classical music:
3 . Jazz is a popular folk music equally in artistic merit to classical music.
This is the accepted view of most jazz musicians and critics. Critic Winthrop Sargeant, writing in 1943, after Duke Ellington’s Carnegie Hall debut, claimed:
But jazz is a whole other tradition, it comes from the blues...
In twentieth-century Western art music, an important phenomenon arose - Musical Nationalism; the integration of features of a country’s indigenous folk music with the intention of expressing pride in that nation and its culture. For instance, musical nationalism in Sibelius’s work is regarded by many as a contributing factor in Finland’s growth of a national identity, key to gaining independence from Russia. Other composers known for musical nationalism include Rodrigo, Vaughan-Williams, and Bartók. The blues origins of jazz then can be easily accounted for as a form of Musical Nationalism. Looking again at Duke Ellington, it’s notable that Louis Proyect describes Duke Ellington as a ‘Black nationalist’, who ‘sought to elevate the status of Black people in his music’. Like Sibelius seeking to build the national identity of the Finns to gain emancipation from Russia, Ellington seeks to build upon the sense of black identity so that black Americans might gain emancipation from oppression. When, in 1959, Ellington received the NAACP’s Springarn Medal for outstanding achievement by an African-American, there was some uproar at how he could have received an award for contributions towards the advancement of civil rights, the award Martin Luther King Jr had received just two years earlier. Ellington responded to the criticism: ‘They have not been listening to our music. For a long time, social protest and pride in black culture and history have been the most significant themes in what we’ve done.’ In the context of the rise of Musical Nationalism, jazz’s inclusion of elements of African-American folk music doesn’t contradict the idea that jazz is a constituent part of 20th Century classical music, rather it can be re-understood as one of jazz’s definitively classical features.
The objection to jazz being part of Bach’s tradition is that it sounds nothing like Bach, but in reality, in modernist music, very little does. John Cage’s silence doesn’t, Stockhausen’s tape experiments don’t, and nor do his orchestral works, nor Steve Reich’s Clapping Music. Like much of the 20th Century’s most forward thinking art music, jazz does not sound classical, but (like Serialism, Minimalism, Neoclassicism and Musique Concrète) it is based upon the classical conventions which it is constantly subverting.
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| Duke Ellington composing at the piano. |
Don’t be pedantic, the word “classical” has already been severed from meaning the Classical period of Haydn and Mozart, so that “classical” merely means Western art music. Again, I know – and you know – that all music is art, but it’s a term for the more stuck up academics and critics basically meaning the opposite of Bieber. Actually, we can drop “western” because Ravi Shankar and the like are referred to as Hindustani classical music, so this is not a strictly western thing. I shall discuss four different views on comparing jazz to classical music:
1 . Jazz is inferior to classical music.
Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Harbison, when asked about broadening the scope of the Pulitzer prize to include all “serious” music (not just European art music but jazz too), called it ‘a horrible development. If you were to impose a comparable standard on fiction you would be soliciting entries from the authors of airport novels.’
In 1965, the jury of the Pulitzer Prize decided to award Duke Ellington ‘a token award’ for his overall output as a composer (the Pulitzer is an award for a single piece of music), but the award was overturned by the Pulitzer board. Nat Hentoff recalled what Ellington said to him the next day: ‘I’m hardly surprised that my music is still without official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European-based – classical music, if you will – is the only really respectable kind. By and large, in this country, jazz has always been the kind of man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.’ It wasn’t until 1997 that Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz musician to get the award (only in 1996 had George Walker become the first black composer to receive the award). Duke Ellington, throughout his lifetime (1899-1973), fulfilled a dream of his – to move jazz into the concert hall, as he became the first black jazz composer/bandleader to perform at Carnegie Hall, back in 1943. The “serious” jazz music of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Theolonius Monk, Miles Davis and others meant for a move towards seeing jazz as a music just as artistic and “serious” as classical music.
Pulitzer Prize winning composer John Harbison, when asked about broadening the scope of the Pulitzer prize to include all “serious” music (not just European art music but jazz too), called it ‘a horrible development. If you were to impose a comparable standard on fiction you would be soliciting entries from the authors of airport novels.’
In 1965, the jury of the Pulitzer Prize decided to award Duke Ellington ‘a token award’ for his overall output as a composer (the Pulitzer is an award for a single piece of music), but the award was overturned by the Pulitzer board. Nat Hentoff recalled what Ellington said to him the next day: ‘I’m hardly surprised that my music is still without official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European-based – classical music, if you will – is the only really respectable kind. By and large, in this country, jazz has always been the kind of man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.’ It wasn’t until 1997 that Wynton Marsalis became the first jazz musician to get the award (only in 1996 had George Walker become the first black composer to receive the award). Duke Ellington, throughout his lifetime (1899-1973), fulfilled a dream of his – to move jazz into the concert hall, as he became the first black jazz composer/bandleader to perform at Carnegie Hall, back in 1943. The “serious” jazz music of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Theolonius Monk, Miles Davis and others meant for a move towards seeing jazz as a music just as artistic and “serious” as classical music.
2 . Jazz is America’s Classical Music
With the overwhelming public perception at the time being that jazz was pop music and classical was art music, some (Jazz pianist, Billy Taylor, for example) sought to elevate jazz by calling it ‘America’s classical music’. They pointed out similarities such as the intensive study and virtuosic abilities required of performers in both traditions. But Taylor didn’t mean that jazz is like Bach or Beethoven, he said that Jazz ‘is an indigenous American music whose roots and value system are African’ and that classical music ‘must be indigenous to the culture for which it speaks. Jazz meets the criteria by which classical music is judged.’ He is saying, then, that jazz is a classical music (specifically ‘America’s classical music’) as distinct from other classical musics such as those of Europe and India. Alternatively, we might say it is the classical music of African-Americans. Just as rap is considered the poetry of modern African-American culture, jazz, we might say, is its classical music. Perhaps, though, we should object to the idea that it is “classical” at all, as the term “classical” connotes Haydn, Mozart and the like, working within white aristocratic society. It’s arguably patronising to suggest that the use of a term which describes “white music” need be used to elevate jazz to artistic integrity. Likewise, we might say that Ellington’s goal of moving jazz into the concert hall holds it to standards set by white Europeans. In an article headlined ‘Don’t Call Jazz America’s Classical Music’, Jon Pareles writes of jazz: ‘Far from having to borrow status from classical music, it should get respect on its own very different terms.’ Whilst we might respond that “classical” is only used in the same sense as is in “Hindustani classical music”, this euphemism for traditional Indian music is surely just as patronising for the very same reason. In India and America alike, setting “classical” to mean “serious art music” is a fundamentally colonial act.
With the overwhelming public perception at the time being that jazz was pop music and classical was art music, some (Jazz pianist, Billy Taylor, for example) sought to elevate jazz by calling it ‘America’s classical music’. They pointed out similarities such as the intensive study and virtuosic abilities required of performers in both traditions. But Taylor didn’t mean that jazz is like Bach or Beethoven, he said that Jazz ‘is an indigenous American music whose roots and value system are African’ and that classical music ‘must be indigenous to the culture for which it speaks. Jazz meets the criteria by which classical music is judged.’ He is saying, then, that jazz is a classical music (specifically ‘America’s classical music’) as distinct from other classical musics such as those of Europe and India. Alternatively, we might say it is the classical music of African-Americans. Just as rap is considered the poetry of modern African-American culture, jazz, we might say, is its classical music. Perhaps, though, we should object to the idea that it is “classical” at all, as the term “classical” connotes Haydn, Mozart and the like, working within white aristocratic society. It’s arguably patronising to suggest that the use of a term which describes “white music” need be used to elevate jazz to artistic integrity. Likewise, we might say that Ellington’s goal of moving jazz into the concert hall holds it to standards set by white Europeans. In an article headlined ‘Don’t Call Jazz America’s Classical Music’, Jon Pareles writes of jazz: ‘Far from having to borrow status from classical music, it should get respect on its own very different terms.’ Whilst we might respond that “classical” is only used in the same sense as is in “Hindustani classical music”, this euphemism for traditional Indian music is surely just as patronising for the very same reason. In India and America alike, setting “classical” to mean “serious art music” is a fundamentally colonial act.
3 . Jazz is a popular folk music equally in artistic merit to classical music.
This is the accepted view of most jazz musicians and critics. Critic Winthrop Sargeant, writing in 1943, after Duke Ellington’s Carnegie Hall debut, claimed:
‘The mistake of the fashionable jazz aesthetes has been to take jazz out of its simple sidewalk and dance hall milieu where it belongs and pretend that it is a complex, civilized art. In its own surroundings jazz need make no apologies. It is the most vital folk music of our time; it is distinctly and indigenously American, and it speaks a new, infectious dialect that is fresher than anything of the sort Europe has evolved in centuries.’Sargeant goes on to suggest that jazz is the product of creative but uneducated musicians, concluding: ‘Give him the chance to study, and the Negro will soon turn from boogie woogie to Beethoven.’ The racial prejudice is clear here with his insistence that jazz is not ‘civilized art’ and with his final assertion that jazz is the result of a lack of education. Ellington himself wrote to the editor in response to this article, agreeing that jazz is more folk than classical but if he thought it lacks complexity, ‘Mr Sargeant has evidently not been exposed to some of the more intelligent jazz’. To the final claim that the educated negro would leave jazz behind, Ellington responds: ‘Maybe so, but what a shame! There is so much that is good in a musical expression in the popular field.’ It’s as if he’s suggesting that this is due not to the nature of jazz but to the archaic and white-centric nature of musical education. Sargeant paints jazz as a folk music in order to keep it incomparable to white classical music and so preserve the assumed artistic supremacy of whites. Whilst more modern opinions may view jazz as no longer inferior to classical, it is still widely regarded as an incomparable folk music. As if perfectly mirroring the segregation of black and white Americans, the segregation of jazz and classical has progressed from absolute white supremacy to the segregationist concept ‘separate but equal’. I would suggest that this view of jazz and classical as two ‘separate but equal’ musics is symptomatic of the culture of segregation, and that in reality the greatest difference between one and the other is the skin colour of their foremost artists. Even Taylor’s view of jazz as ‘America’s classical music’ holds jazz as ‘separate but equal’ to European classical music. I will argue, rather, that jazz is derived from Bach’s European tradition and falls under the broad umbrella of twentieth-century Western art music.
4 . Jazz is part of European classical music.
Let’s break this down into how you might object:
But jazz is improvised and classical is scored...
Well, firstly, jazz is not defined by improvisation – much of what we regard as jazz is scored, pre-though-out, or even uses ‘simulated improvisation’, that is priorly composing passages that sound spontaneously improvised by the performer. This objection (that jazz is improvised and classical scored) also makes generalisations about classical music that do not always stand up, particularly in the twentieth-century with its experimental movements that pushed the previously accepted boundaries. During this period, for many composers, the score was the first thing to go. Composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Christian Wolff sometimes replaced it with graphic scores or vague instructions from which the performer either devises or improvises their own interpretation. Also within 20th Century western art music fell the electroacoustic music of Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer, where a score is redundant; the work being the audio itself. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we should note an often forgotten fact that improvisation was common-place in classical music until relatively recently. The great composers of the European tradition, were themselves great improvisers. Bach, asked to improvise a fugue from a theme given to him by Frederick the Great, improvised what he later adapted and wrote down as his “Musical Offering” from The Art of The Fugue. Musicologist Ernst Ferand has expressed the importance of improvisation in the classical tradition:
Let’s break this down into how you might object:
But jazz is improvised and classical is scored...
Well, firstly, jazz is not defined by improvisation – much of what we regard as jazz is scored, pre-though-out, or even uses ‘simulated improvisation’, that is priorly composing passages that sound spontaneously improvised by the performer. This objection (that jazz is improvised and classical scored) also makes generalisations about classical music that do not always stand up, particularly in the twentieth-century with its experimental movements that pushed the previously accepted boundaries. During this period, for many composers, the score was the first thing to go. Composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Christian Wolff sometimes replaced it with graphic scores or vague instructions from which the performer either devises or improvises their own interpretation. Also within 20th Century western art music fell the electroacoustic music of Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer, where a score is redundant; the work being the audio itself. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we should note an often forgotten fact that improvisation was common-place in classical music until relatively recently. The great composers of the European tradition, were themselves great improvisers. Bach, asked to improvise a fugue from a theme given to him by Frederick the Great, improvised what he later adapted and wrote down as his “Musical Offering” from The Art of The Fugue. Musicologist Ernst Ferand has expressed the importance of improvisation in the classical tradition:
‘There is scarcely a single field in music that has remained unaffected by improvisation, scarcely a musical technique or form of composition that did not originate in improvisatory performance or was not essentially influenced by it. The whole history of [classical] music is accompanied by manifestations of the drive to improvise.’This objection, then, doesn’t hold up, as it ignores the modern breadth of style and the historical performance practices of the European tradition.
But jazz is a whole other tradition, it comes from the blues...
Classical music has a rich tradition; most modern European music can be traced back to Bach’s influence, and when tracing Bach back, we may even say that Western art music starts from medieval plainsong. Jazz, meanwhile, dates back not nearly as far: to Buddy Bolden, to early blues, or the first generations of West Africans enslaved in the Americas. And yet, Jazz is not a tradition of its own, but in many ways an extension of the European tradition. Jazz uses the instruments of the European orchestra, the scales, the harmonies, tonal system, and temperament of Classical, Romantic and Impressionist music, and the basic system of rhythm and metre found across all Western art music since the 17th Century. Certainly, there are two forces at work in jazz, the classical influence and the influence of African-American folk (the blues, work songs and spirituals, for instance).
In twentieth-century Western art music, an important phenomenon arose - Musical Nationalism; the integration of features of a country’s indigenous folk music with the intention of expressing pride in that nation and its culture. For instance, musical nationalism in Sibelius’s work is regarded by many as a contributing factor in Finland’s growth of a national identity, key to gaining independence from Russia. Other composers known for musical nationalism include Rodrigo, Vaughan-Williams, and Bartók. The blues origins of jazz then can be easily accounted for as a form of Musical Nationalism. Looking again at Duke Ellington, it’s notable that Louis Proyect describes Duke Ellington as a ‘Black nationalist’, who ‘sought to elevate the status of Black people in his music’. Like Sibelius seeking to build the national identity of the Finns to gain emancipation from Russia, Ellington seeks to build upon the sense of black identity so that black Americans might gain emancipation from oppression. When, in 1959, Ellington received the NAACP’s Springarn Medal for outstanding achievement by an African-American, there was some uproar at how he could have received an award for contributions towards the advancement of civil rights, the award Martin Luther King Jr had received just two years earlier. Ellington responded to the criticism: ‘They have not been listening to our music. For a long time, social protest and pride in black culture and history have been the most significant themes in what we’ve done.’ In the context of the rise of Musical Nationalism, jazz’s inclusion of elements of African-American folk music doesn’t contradict the idea that jazz is a constituent part of 20th Century classical music, rather it can be re-understood as one of jazz’s definitively classical features.
The objection to jazz being part of Bach’s tradition is that it sounds nothing like Bach, but in reality, in modernist music, very little does. John Cage’s silence doesn’t, Stockhausen’s tape experiments don’t, and nor do his orchestral works, nor Steve Reich’s Clapping Music. Like much of the 20th Century’s most forward thinking art music, jazz does not sound classical, but (like Serialism, Minimalism, Neoclassicism and Musique Concrète) it is based upon the classical conventions which it is constantly subverting.
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